We’d like to think Jesse Pinkman is hanging out in some dive bar in Anchorage enjoying his new life, but if you look at Breaking Bad’s finale honestly and realistically … creator Vince Gilligan notes that probably didn’t actually happen.

“My personal feeling is that he got away,” Gilligan said to GQ magazine, echoing what he told us previously. But then Gilligan had to add: “But the most likely thing, as negative as this sounds, is that they’re going to find this kid’s fingerprints all over this lab and they’re going to find him within a day or a week or a month. And he’s still going to be on the hook for the murder of two federal agents.”

Fingerprints in the lab! Of course … Pinkman should have torched the lab before he rage-crashed out the gate. But you can hardly blame the guy for not wanting to spend another second in that compound where he worked as a meth-slave. Aw, what a bummer coda….

Gilligan tried to reassure: “But yeah, even though that’s the most likely outcome, the way I see it is that he got away and got to Alaska, changed his name, and had a new life. You want that for the kid. He deserves it.”

Thanks, but we’re now picturing Pinkman being pulled over and arrested in Utah, getting dragged back to New Mexico and serving a life sentence after Skyler happily testifies against him.

In another tidbit from the interview, Gilligan gave a rather humble answer when asked what was the secret to Breaking Bad’s success:

“Have you ever been sitting at your desk and you crumple up a piece of paper and, without even looking, you just toss it over your shoulder and it goes straight into the wastebasket? You didn’t think about it. You didn’t stress about it. You just did it. And now that you’re thinking about it, you could never do it again in a million years, no matter how hard you tried. That’s what this was like. We worked our butts off, but everybody works their butts off in TV. We tried to make the best show it was humanly possible to make, but you know, the guys on According to Jim did the same thing. As to why this thing hit…I could make up some stream of nonsense, but honestly…I wish I could explain it, because then I might have a fighting chance on TV in the future. The truth is, I just have to be satisfied that it happened at all.”